Comprising a selection of the papers given at a 1999 conference on Yoruba religion as a global phenomenon, this massive volume has given the editors the usual headache in such cases, of how to give a focus to a very heterogeneous field. Part I (10 chapters) deals with Africa; Part II (16 chapters) with the New World. There is a certain ambiguity in just how the subject is to be conceived: are we talking of, as in the subtitle, ‘Yoruba religious culture’ (most of which is nowadays realized through Islamic or Christian forms); or of its most distinctive form, the orisa cults, as a globalized phenomenon; or, as the editors suggest in the Introduction, pushing ahead of any of the contributors, of orisa devotion as a world religion – that is, one which, if not up with the ‘big three’ of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, might at least be compared with the second tier of faiths such as Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, or Jainism. Since ‘having a history’ is one of the key criteria here, the division of papers between ‘Yoruba religious culture’ in Africa and beyond Africa has potentially an analytical point, for history connects them.

Although most of the chapters dealing with Africa evince that static and culturalist quality that is common in studies of Yoruba traditional religion, three address historical questions. Sandra Barnes analyses chiefly installation rites in Lagos as containing a reprise of its religious and political history. Flora Kaplan gives a twist to the globalization theme, by arguing that it enabled the Yoruba to create a myth of the cultural hegemony of Ife over Benin, which her interpretation of the Benin evidence does not support. Hakeem Danmole writes of the ‘domestication’ of Islam – a religion centuries old among the Yoruba – though he ends by dwelling on the growing reaction among many Yoruba Muslims against it.

Part II begins with a short paper by Olabiyi Yai, which in effect is the fulcrum of the whole volume. It argues that the present, ‘post-Atlantic’, stage of Yoruba religious globalization needs to be seen in terms of two earlier stages: one where cults were shared between the Yoruba and their immediate West African neighbours, and a second where Yoruba cults spread to the New World through slavery. There then follow 12 chapters on diasporic Yoruba religion, beginning with Afe Adogame on Aladura Christianity in Europe. But this, like the paper on Yoruba Islam, stands somewhat apart from the dominant perspective of the book, since here, while the world religions are infused with the ethos of the orisa cults, they also strive to displace them. By contrast, in the Catholic New World (as represented here in eight chapters on aspects of Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santeria, and Brazilian Candomble), a pattern of coexistence and identification linked the orisa and the saints. Two chapters concern the reinvented orisa-religion of Oyotunji village in South Carolina. The cultural complexities that result from the interaction between Latino (including exiled Cuban) and African Americans are explored in two papers that highlight what is perhaps the cardinal choice faced by the orisa tradition in the Americas: whether it is to be primarily a vehicle for black consciousness or to spread itself as truly a ‘world religion’, which means emancipating itself from race.

General themes take up the remaining four papers: two reflect interestingly on changes in the media of transmission – from oral through print to digital – and two address the question of gender in orisa-worship. The last of these – Lorand Matory's hard-hitting riposte to Oyewumi's thesis that pre-colonial Yoruba culture did not recognize gender – is arguably the most impressive piece in the book, though also the least essentially concerned with its subject. A Postscript by the historian of Yoruba religion John Pemberton, to whom the volume is dedicated, agreeably rounds the collection off.